For the record, the car we "unloaded" was a car that spent 3 years on the lot and the woman who owned it had multiple certified letters returned with no delivery, contacted her place of employment and was told she quit and disappeared and had no way to contact her, phone numbers no good, etc. It got to the point that the money/time (which is worth money) spent trying to go through the BMV would have exceeded the value of the car out of our pocket and at that point "our style" becomes hundreds of dollars lost for someone who abandoned a car.
Your case is different because it happened recently, I think you are on the right track. If you have the owners name, couldn't you just contact the body that is handling the estate possibly via an obituary and explain the situation? Especially since the car is titled in the deceased name?
Remember, the people in impound are in the business of possessing abandoned, stricken, mis-parked, etc. cars. If there wasn't profit for them somewhere, they wouldn't be in the business of handling "problematic" cars.